President Shalala part of initiative that releases report on how America’s health and obesity crisis

(June 13, 2012) —
A bipartisan group of former cabinet secretaries released a comprehensive and actionable plan to improve America’s physical and fiscal crises, driven by the alarming rates of obesity and chronic disease.

Former Secretaries of Health and Human Services Donna E. Shalala and Mike Leavitt and former Secretaries of Agriculture Dan Glickman and Ann M. Veneman released the recommendations on June 5 at a press conference in Washington D.C., calling needed attention to the nation’s mounting health care spending, which is expected to reach $4.6 trillion dollars annually by 2020 and consume 19.8 percent of gross domestic product.

The report, titled “Lots to Lose: How America’s Health and Obesity Crisis Threatens our Economic Future,” from the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Nutrition and Physical Activity Initiative, calls on the public and private sectors to collaborate in creating healthy families, schools, workplaces, and communities, focusing on existing best practices that can be implemented on a large scale to broaden their impact and help scale back obesity in the U.S.

To read the full report, click here. To read the co-chairs’ op-ed piece, click here.

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University of Miami President Donna E. Shalala, second from right, one of the co-chairs of the Bipartisan Policy Center's Nutrition and Physical Activity Initiative, address the media during the press conference on June 5 in Washington, D.C.